


"When I close my eyes, the seasons I spent with you come back to my mind"

by darkdropout



Category: Arashi (Band)
Genre: Broken Bones, Incest, M/M, My Girl PV au, OT5 brotherly love, mentions of parent death, mentions of sickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-30
Updated: 2012-03-30
Packaged: 2017-11-10 02:29:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkdropout/pseuds/darkdropout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <a href="http://facedl.com/fvideo.php?f=awwnqquqowqax&arashi-my-girl-pv-uploaded-by-me-sayouuuu">My Girl PV! AU</a>
</p><p> </p><p>It takes them longer than it should to realize what’s going on, what’s been going on, all these years between their brothers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"When I close my eyes, the seasons I spent with you come back to my mind"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [walking_orgy](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=walking_orgy).



> My Girl PV! universe in which Arashi play five brothers. For [](http://walking-orgy.livejournal.com/profile)[**walking_orgy**](http://walking-orgy.livejournal.com/) on a day that is totally, absolutely not her birthday, but just a random day which I celebrate by giving her fic ♥
> 
> Also so much love to **[](http://araanaz9.livejournal.com/profile)[**araanaz9**](http://araanaz9.livejournal.com/)** for hand-holding! 
> 
> Title from lyrics of [Arashi's "My Girl"](http://taijiproject.livejournal.com/97121.html) as translated by [](http://taijiproject.livejournal.com/profile)[**taijiproject**](http://taijiproject.livejournal.com/).

**Ohno: Ichiro, b. 1980  
Sho: Jiro, b. 1982  
Aiba: Saburo, b. 1983  
Nino: Shiro, b. 1985  
Jun: Goro, b. 1986**

**  
**

1985 (Ichiro 5, Shiro 0)

1\. When Shiro is born, Ichiro is the first to see him after Dad.

“This is Shiro,” Mom tells him as he presses up on tip-toes over the side of her hospital bed.

“Cute,” Ichiro says. He reaches out with tiny fingers to pet at the squished face wrapped tight in his old baby blanket. “Shiro-chan.”

Shiro leans into the touch, gurgles conversationally, then spits up all over Ichiro’s hand.

 

1988 (Ichiro 8, Shiro 3)

2\. Shiro follows Ichiro around from the time he can crawl. Ichiro never seems to mind.

“Ichi-yii!” Shiro will squawk (“Because he’s only little and he can’t say his ‘n’s yet!” Jiro points out with all his seven-year-old diplomacy) and hang off Ichiro like a chubby-cheeked, cuddly limpet, all runny nose and sticky-fingers.

While the others run to Mom when they’re hurt or scared or lonely, Shiro always heads straight for his brother.

“Ichiro,” Mom says to her oldest son one day after an hour of chasing a shrieking Shiro in circles around the house in a fruitless attempt to comb his unruly hair. She gives Ichiro the brush, puts a hand on his shoulder and looks him in the eye, her tone jokingly serious. “I’m leaving him in your care.”

She tries not to laugh at Ichiro’s earnest expression, the way his brow furrows as he nods at her determinedly.

“Yes, Mama,” he says and trots off to coax Shiro out from where he's barricaded himself into the cabinet under the bathroom sink.

Ten minutes later, Shiro’s hair is smooth and neat where he’s curled up purring in Ichiro’s lap and his mother wonders how much she was really kidding.

 

  


1991 (Ichiro 11, Shiro 6)

3\. Shiro holds Ichiro’s hand at the breakfast table, sits on his lap during dinner and hooks a chin over his shoulder when everyone sits under the kotatsu together before bed. He even shares baths with Ichi-nii until he’s gotten too big for them to both fit in the tub.

When he’s six years old, he tells his kindergarten teacher he’s not ever going to get married, that he’s going to live with Ichiro-nii forever. The teacher laughs, pats him on the head and sends him home with a pamphlet for his mother on sibling separation techniques.

 

 

1993 (Ichiro 13, Shiro 8)

4\. Goro is a very serious child and sensitive about being the youngest. By the time he reaches five, he’s always making proclamations about his maturity, making rules about what he can and can’t do at his age.

At seven years old, he announces to Shiro and the room at large that they are now far too old to sit in Ichiro’s lap anymore.

“It’s time to grow up,” he tells Shiro solemnly.

Shiro ignores him and continues to do as he pleases despite Goro’s snide disapproval. It's not until a few years later when Ichiro, with Shiro's added weight, breaks one of the dining room chairs and sends them both tumbling to the floor, that Shiro concedes.

From then on, he's only in Ichiro's lap when they're sitting on the floor.

 

5\. Ichiro is diplomatic with his attentions to a fault.

If Jiro wants to practice his debate speech, Ichiro listens and never falls asleep during it (except for the time he falls asleep with his eyes open, but Jiro doesn't notice so it doesn't count).

If Saburo needs someone to test his latest concoction, which no matter how old he gets is always a form of mabo tofu, Ichiro tastes it and says “Delicious!”

Goro is the baby of the family by eighteen months. When he wants Ichiro’s attention he always gets it, no matter what.

And when Shiro comes zooming in from school, barrels Ichiro over and clings to him, Ichiro slides arms around Shiro's waist and let’s him stay there as long as he wants. He never even tells when he feels Shiro’s tears against his skin.

 

6\. When they’re still young, it becomes a tradition that one night a week they all clamber into Mom’s bed together. Once they get too big to all fit comfortably without making Dad sleep on the couch, they move to Ichiro’s bed, the five of them curling up together and giggling themselves to sleep.

The tradition stops abruptly when Jiro dubs himself an “adult”, tells them that cuddle parties are a distraction to his homework and disappears to practice his long division. Saburo follows soon after if only because he wants to be called an “adult” too. (Although sometimes when Saburo has a nightmare, he sneaks back in when Jiro isn’t looking.)

Shiro and Goro keep coming for a time, but eventually Goro adds sleeping in his big brother’s bed to the list of things he is too mature to do.

Shiro never breaks the tradition. Once a week, he slides open the door to Ichiro’s room and crawls into bed with him. Most nights he sleeps so close it’s claustrophobic – on top of Ichiro's chest, head tucked under Ichiro's chin and hand curled into the front of Ichiro's shirt.

As Shiro gets older, the number of nights he spends in Ichiro’s bed get more frequent instead of less. One night turns into two, then three, then more.

Ichiro never says anything, just holds open the covers and lets Shiro in.

 

  


1995 (Ichiro 15, Shiro 10)

7\. Shiro breaks his wrist one summer. He’s playing baseball in the park behind their house, slides too roughly into their make-shift home plate and shatters all the tiny bones in his left hand. Saburo is there to see it and there to half-carry Shiro home as he pretends not to cry from the pain.

Ichiro doesn’t pretend at all. When Shiro holds out his mangled wrist, eyes bright with tears, Ichiro cries so hard that Goro laughs at him.

In the end, Shiro is the one who has to console Ichiro and promise him that everything will be all right.

 

 

1998 (Ichiro 18, Shiro 13)

8\. As the years go on, Jiro gets more and more uncomfortable with the way Shiro drapes himself around their older brother.

When Shiro is thirteen, seventeen-year-old Jiro takes it upon himself to pull Shiro aside and tell him he has to stop. “You’re too old to keep throwing yourself at him,” Jiro says as gently as he can.

Shiro makes a face at him, one that conveys the full range of his own maturity – he sticks out his tongue.

“Mama doesn’t care,” he tells Jiro, petulantly. “She says it’s cute.”

Three years later, when their mother dies, Jiro stops bothering to say anything at all.

 

9\. Goro shares a room with Shiro, shares a bunk-bed with him, so he knows that Shiro never sleeps there.

Goro’s always thought that Shiro loves Ichi-nii too much, thinks that Shiro unfairly monopolizes his brother’s time. Only that’s not quite true. Ichiro seeks out Shiro the same way that Shiro does him. Goro finds the two of them in the living room, sitting on opposite ends of the couch. He watches unnoticed from the doorway as Ichiro pulls, pulls, pulls Shiro towards him, close enough to press their foreheads together. He sees the way Ichiro reaches out and puts a hand over Shiro’s heart.

There are days when Goro’s jealous. Ichi-nii is his big brother too after all and yet there’s never a moment when he’s not with Shiro. But as Goro gets older, he realizes that maybe there’s something different about the way that Ichi-nii loves Shiro. There's different looks and different touches between them than between anyone else. He remembers the look on Ichiro’s face as he pressed his palm to Shiro’s chest.

Ichiro loves Shiro, he decides, not more or less than the rest of them, just differently.

After that he’s not so jealous anymore.

 

  


2000 (Ichiro 20, Shiro 15)

10\. Ichiro has girlfriends and some nights Shiro sneaks open the door to his brother's room to find the bed empty and unslept in.

On those nights, Shiro sleeps there anyway and when Ichiro stumbles in the next morning, smelling of tequila and women’s perfume, Shiro rolls over and lets him in.

 

  


2001 (Ichiro 21, Shiro 16)

11\. After Mom dies, Ichiro never spends another night away from the house.

 

  


2002 (Ichiro 22, Shiro 17)

12\. Saburo doesn't think anything of it. Ichi-nii dotes on Shiro-chan, just like Ji-nii dotes on Saburo and all of them dote on Goro. They’ve always all been close. That’s how brothers are supposed to be.

Then one night Saburo has a nightmare. It’s about Mom, back when she was sick, when she was suffering. He jolts awake, suddenly struck with the overwhelming urge to crawl into Ichi-nii’s bed like they all used to years ago.

He gets up carefully so that he doesn’t wake Jiro in the bed beside him. He makes it down the hallway without incident, quiet in socked feet, and is about to slide open the door to Ichiro’s room when he hears it – hears Shiro.

At first it sounds like Shiro’s crying and later Saburo is sure he must have been too. But then Shiro moans, loud and raw, with unmistakable need. Still, in the dark, it takes Saburo longer than it should to realize what’s going on, what’s been going on, all these years between his brothers.

When he does, he turns and makes his way silently back to his room. He crawls back into his own bed and he falls asleep.

He doesn’t have any more nightmares about his mother.

 

 

2004 (Ichiro 24, Shiro 19)

13\. It’s been almost a week since Shiro has slept in Ichiro’s bed. Instead he tosses and turns in his own bunk, keeping Goro awake with the heaviness of his silence.

Goro gets up for a glass of water in the middle of the night to find Ichiro loitering in the hall outside the bedroom door. Even in the darkness, Goro can see Ichiro’s face, see the broken look in his eyes. More than that, he sees the way his brother's hands shake as he smiles at Goro half-heartedly, like he knows he’s finally been caught.

Goro goes to the kitchen. When he gets back, glass in hand, Ichiro is still standing across from the open doorway, looking heart-breakingly unsure. Goro pushes past him into the room, grabs his pillow and blanket and leaves to spend the night somewhere else.

(When Goro bullies his way into Jiro’s bed, Jiro grumbles but rolls over to make room. When Saburo piles in on top of them a few minutes later, Goro kicks him in the shin but lets Saburo share his pillow. They all know why they're there. They don’t really mind.)

 

14\. Ichiro hasn’t been in Shiro’s bed in years – not since, at seven years old, Shiro made a permanent fort of his little bottom-bunk and put up a sign reading ‘KEEP OUT (THIS MEANS YOU SABURO).’

Ichiro pushes back the curtain and Shiro blinks at him sleepily for a moment before holding open the covers so that Ichiro can slide in beside him, can hold him close.

It’s not the first time Ichiro’s said ‘I love you,’ but when he says it this time Shiro finally understands what he’s been trying to say all these years.

 

  


2006 (Ichiro 26, Shiro 21)

15\. Goro makes Jiro and Saburo help him dismantle the bunk-bed and leave the pieces by the curb for the garbage man to take away. He buys a new bed, one so big it takes up the entire room.

It takes three days for Shiro to notice.

“Where’s all my stuff?” Shiro asks, glancing around suspiciously, a little nervous.

Goro gives him an incredulous look. They both know it’s been years since Shiro’s kept anything but outgrown clothes and old report cards there.

“Grow up already,” Goro says.

Shiro smiles, lets out a breath he’s been holding for twenty-one years. “What color are you going to paint it?” he asks.

 

16\. That night, all five of them pile into Goro’s new bed together. Goro complains when Saburo drools on his new sheets. Jiro keeps them awake grinding his teeth and Shiro hogs most of the blankets. Ichiro snores. It’s a little uncomfortable now that they’re grown, but none of them mind.

After all, this is how brothers are supposed to be.

 


End file.
